How an early ’90s Windows gaming classic was unearthed after years in limbo

25 years after the original, Chip’s Challenge 2 finally sees the light of day.

If you ever looked through the Games folder on an early to mid-'90s Windows PC—pre-Internet you had to seek out distraction—there's a decent chance you’d have stumbled on Chip's Challenge. The surprisingly deep tile-based puzzle game was part of the fourth Microsoft Entertainment Pack and later its "Best of Microsoft Entertainment Pack." Thus, it came pre-installed on millions of off-the-shelf systems made by OEMs, and the game was purchased by millions more early Windows gamers.

Late last month, that cult hit finally saw the release of a proper sequel, Chip’s Challenge 2, which hit Steam over 25 years after the first game’s release. But this isn’t the usual story of a developer revamping a long-neglected classic gaming property using today’s game design lessons. In fact, Chip’s Challenge 2 has actually been complete for over 15 years; a lost classic trapped in limbo thanks to a prolonged publishing battle involving the decline of Atari, a devoted modding community, and a religious software house.

A Windows 3.1 cult classic

To explain why Chip’s Challenge 2 couldn’t be released when it was completed in 1999, we have to go back to the creation of the first game. The original Chip’s Challenge actually started as a launch title for Atari’s failed handheld, the Lynx, in 1989. To fill an unexpected hole in the Lynx’s launch lineup, developer Chuck Somerville marshaled a team of idle programmers at Epyx (the company that originally designed the Lynx) to throw the game together in the 10-week window before the system’s release.

“It was a kind of a game I had always been thinking about,” Somerville told Ars. “It probably would have never been approved if I had just gone to the marketing department and said, 'Hey I want to do this game.' But Epyx suddenly had the resources available, and it was the game I wanted to do because I wanted to play it."

While the Lynx and the original Chip’s Challenge both failed to find much of an audience, the game found new life after being ported to Windows in 1991 and later distributed widely through those Entertainment Packs. On the PC, the game gained a devoted following of players who wanted more than the nearly 150 levels in the original game.

“It was really one of the first experiments in modding, I think,” Somerville said. “The fans basically found the file that contained the level set for the Windows version and they reverse engineered it. They figured out exactly what was in the file and then they started designing their own level editors... this was very early modding before it was possible."

Enlarge/ A sample of the ridiculous levels that could be created with the fan-made level editor for the original Chip's Challenge.

Joshua Bone was one of those early super-fans. He played the game on his grandpa’s 386 whenever he’d go to visit. “I would pretty much walk in with the family, hug my grandparents, and ask to play Chip’s Challenge,” he told Ars. “When I was back at home I would make levels on paper with little cutout push blocks and bombs, and ice rink mazes. I was obsessed.”

Bone would go on to rediscover the game when his family got its first 33K modem. “I found an early level editor a guy had designed for it and began making levels. When I had 50 of them made, I posted them to a Chip’s Challenge fan site. I think they were the first custom level set to hit the Internet.”

With others, Bone helped cultivate an online community of fans that has maintained "a serious but small following throughout the years," he said. These Chip's devotees continued building and sharing increasingly complex new puzzles using the game’s variety of intricately connected setpieces. Soon after forming, members of that community started reaching out to Somerville to see if there was a chance of the true sequel they craved.

Somerville had moved on to work in the LED lighting industry after Epyx failed alongside the Lynx. He was surprised to find there was still a dedicated audience for his game. So he got to work, devoting his free time to tinkering with new ideas for bigger levels, more complex puzzle interactions, and even a system of full in-game Boolean circuits that pre-dated Minecraft’s famous redstone by years ("I'm sure that you could build a small computer in it, if you really wanted to,” he said). Somerville even recruited members of the fan community as testers and level builders.

After two years of work, Chip’s Challenge 2 was finally complete in 1999. And that’s when Somerville found out his creation was essentially being held ransom by a company that had little to no interest in video games.

Enter Bridgestone Multimedia

Bridgestone bought the rights to Chip's Challenge, but it was more interested into PC gaming forays like 1994's Captain Bible in Dome of Darkness.

By the time Chip’s Challenge 2 was complete, the rights to the game and the name belonged to Bridgestone Multimedia Group, a Christian-based publishing house whose current line of products includes DVD movies like Heaven is Waiting and The Light of Freedom. Bridgestone had acquired those rights nearly a decade earlier when it bought a struggling Epyx that had been hit hard by the failure of the Lynx. It was all an effort to get the rights to a single project that had little to do with Epyx’s gaming properties.

“As Epyx was dying, one of the last projects one of the last programmers ever did was Bible Builder,” Somerville recalled. “He was a religious fundamentalist, and he thought maybe we can stay in the game by making religious software. They gave it a shot."

Though Bible Builder failed to make an impact, Bridgestone still found itself with the rights to the entire Epyx catalog, which included successful titles like California Games, Impossible Mission, Jumpman, and… Chip’s Challenge.

Somerville knew the rights situation when he started development of Chip’s Challenge 2, but he says Bridgestone had assured him they would work with him to release the game when it was complete. After two years of hard work, though, Somerville was met with a surprise. Bridgestone asked him to pay a six-figure sum, up front, for the right to publish the game himself.

"The amount of money that they were talking, it would be in sync with the amount of money Bloomsbury would expect for the rights to Harry Potter, or EA would pay for Lord of the Rings,” said Barnabas Cleave, director of eventual Chip’s Challenge 2 publisher Niffler. “That’s the sort of money they think they can ask for upfront from a lone developer."

This is not how games publishing usually works. Often, the publisher who controls the rights to a game property will pay to fund development of a game, taking the lion’s share of any profits in exchange for the risk of that funding. In other cases, the rights holder might license the property to a developer for a small fee or under a sale-based royalty system.

But Bridgestone seemed wedded to the idea of a large, upfront payment for a game IP it had never been interested in in the first place, in an industry it didn’t really have a stake in. “They didn’t really understand the games industry.” Somerville said. “I think they had illusions about what it was because of what was in the popular press.”

As a lone programmer outside the industry, Somerville didn’t have anything close to the six-figure sum Bridgestone was demanding. And while he could have changed the graphics and released the game under a different name, branding issues and potential liability over the original game’s source code made that a non-starter, he said.

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl